The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

What interests me
is that these seven articles reflect the work of six reporters and seven
editors (seven to six! Glad to see Reuters has a handle on the key ratios!) in
five bureaus and they all include the same stock phrase.How’s that work?Does headquarters issue a ukaz that all
articles about the South China Sea must include the magic $5 trillion
phrase?Does the copyediting program
flag every reference to the South China Sea omitting the figure?Or did the reportorial hive mind linking
Beijing, Manila, Hanoi, Hong Kong, and Sydney spontaneously and unanimously decided
that “$5 trillion” is an indispensable accessory for South China Sea reporting?

I guess it’s
understandable.A more accurate
characterization of the South China Sea as “a useful but not indispensable
waterway for world shipping whose commercial importance, when properly
exaggerated, provides a pretext for the United States to meddle in Southeast
Asian affairs at the PRC’s expense” is excessively verbose and fails to convey
a sense of urgency.

The
kicker, of course, is that the lion's share of the $5 trillion is
China trade, and most of the balance passes through the South China Sea
by choice and not by necessity.

In other words, the only major power with a vital strategic interest in Freedom
of Navigation in the South China Sea is the People’s Republic of China.And the powers actually interested in impeding Freedom of Navigation down there are...pretty much everybody else, led by the United States.

Obviously, words
fail me.

Instead, let’s look
at a map.

Here’s the map not
to look at.The oft-reproduced and
abused US Department of Energy deranged tentacled monster hydrocarbon liver fluke writhing in the South China Sea map:

Instead, let’s look
at Marine
Traffic, a most interesting website which offers dynamic real time ship
information and some useful historical data free of charge, and provides an idea of the actual shipping patterns in the region.

If you select the
“density map” option and zoom in, you get this view of the busiest shipping
routes (green lines) and busiest ports (red blobs) in and around the South
China Sea:

Note that marine
traffic in the South China Sea does a few things.First of all, much of it goes,
unsurprisingly, to the Peoples Republic of China and Hong Kong.Second, except when friendship-building volleyball games in the middle of the SCS are on the agenda, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the
Philippines are largely served by coast-hugging routes outside the PRC’s
dreaded Nine-Dash-Line.

Third, the rest of
the traffic that transits the SCS pretty much on a straight line is headed for
Japan and South Korea.This would seem
to support the perception that Japan and South Korea, our precious allies, need
protection against threats to their supply of hydrocarbon-based joy juice,
their economies, indeed their national security and ways of life emanating from
the overbearing PRC presence on the South China Sea lifeline.

Not quite.

The strategic insignificance
of the South China Sea to Japan and the Republic of Korea has been well known
since the 1990s, when "energy security" became an explicit
preoccupation of Japanese planners.

Here is an insightful passage from a book by
Euan Graham, Japan's Sea Lane Security: A
Matter of Life and Death?, published in 2005.

The cost to Japan of a 12-month closure of the South China Sea,
diverting oil tankers via the Lombok Strait and east of the Philippines, has
been estimated at $200 million.A
Japanese estimate puts the cost as basically the same to that imposed by a closure
of the Malacca Strait, requiring 15 additional tankers to be added to the
route, generating an extra $88 million in shipping costs.This is roughly corroborated by the reported
findings of a joint study conducted by the JDA and the Indonesian authorities
in the late 1980s, which put the number of extra tankers required to divert
around the South China Sea via Lombok and east of the Philippines at 18.

...The volume of oil shipped to Japan from the Middle East is evenly
split between Lombok and the Straits of Malacca...

Here’s a nice map
showing the Lombok route, also mentioning the only difference with Malacca—two
more days in sailing time over twenty days for the straight shot through the
South China Sea.Also note, as this
graphic does, that the biggest biggest crude carriers, 300,000 DWT and up, can only take the Lombok route.

What does two extra
days on the water mean?Per Graham,

...Based on an oil import bill of $35 billion in 1997, [a cost of $88
million for diverting through Lombok] accounts for 0.3% of the total.

To update these
figures, the oil/tanker market has gone pretty gonzo recently, as everyone is
aware.Crude prices have gone down,
while tanker rates are currently upupup as importers stampede buy cheap strategic reserves
and, on occasion, hold the tankers for temporary storage instead of releasing
them back into the wild.Most recent shipping
figure I could find was about $2.50/barrel from the Gulf to Japan.

Let's assume $30/barrel
crude plus $3/barrel shipping costs.Japan imports about 2 billion barrels per year.That's $6 billion dollars.And we assume the Lombok route adds 10% or
$0.30/barrel to the shipping cost.That's another $600 million dollars against $60 billion in total crude
costs.1%.By a funny coincidence, $600 million is also
about 1% of the annual Japanese defense budget.Japan's GDP: $4 trillion dollars.

So is Japan going
to light off World War III to keep the purportedly vital SCS SLOC open and save
1% on its oil bill?

Here's one fellow who
doesn't think so:

CSD [Collective Self Defense] will not allow minesweeping ops in
SCS/Malacca Strait as unlike Hormuz there are alternative routes.

That's a statement
that notorious appeaser, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, made in the Diet, as
reported on Corey Wallace's Twitter feed.

Republic of Korea:
imports less than 1 billion barrels per annum.Cost of the Lombok detour: maybe $270 million.

Bottom line,
everybody prefers to use Malacca/South China Sea to get from the Persian Gulf
to Japan and South Korea.It’s the
straightest, it’s the cheapest, there’s Singapore, and, in fact, shipowners looked
at the economics and decided to dial back the construction of “postMalaccamax
VLCCs” (Very Large Crude Carriers) so they’d always have the option of going
through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea.

But if that route
goes blooey, they can always go via Lombok and the Makassar Sea.Just a little bit more expensive.

So, the South China
Sea is not a critical sea lane for our primary North Asian allies Japan and the
Republic of Korea.

What about the threat
to the Antipodes?Core ally Australia?If the PRC shut down the South China Sea,
what would that do to Australian exports (other than to China, naturally)?

From Euan Graham’s
volume quoted above:

Iron ore and coke shipments from Australia account for most of the
cargo moved through the Lombok Strait...Lombok remains the principal route for
bulk carriers sailing from Western Australia to Japan.

They use Lombok already!

As to the South
China Sea factor, Sam Bateman, a retired Royal Australian Navy commodore who
now think-tanks in Singapore, debunked a dubious piece of
numerology by Bonnie Glaser:

Bonnie Glaser has recently claimed that approximately 60 per cent of
Australia’s seaborne trade passes through the South China Sea…

When measured by value, the figure of 60% of our seaborne trade
passing through the South China Sea is way off the mark. Based on the latest
data for Australia’s overseas trade, it mightn’t even be half that—and about
three-quarters of it would be trade to and from China. Thus the notion of a
threat to our seaborne trade from China is rather a non-sequitur.

Doing the math…25%
of 30%...that’s 7.5% of Australia’s total seaborne trade by value through the
South China Sea isn’t going to the PRC.Back
of the envelope, that’s A$40 billion, about half of which is back and forth
with Singapore, which could be end-arounded by entering the Malacca Strait from
the west and avoiding the South China Sea completely.So maybe A$ 20 billion theoretically at risk in
the unlikely event that the PRC decided to close the SCS completely to Australian
shipping.By contrast, Australian two
way trade with the PRC: A$152 billion.

If you are
wondering why there is a “spirited debate” as to whether confronting the PRC,
the biggest customer for Australian ore and real estate, in the South China Sea
serves Australia’s national interest, I think you have your answer.

Euan Graham, now Director
of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, recently appeared on
Australian television to remark that "geography doesn't change".No kidding.

It's worth watching
his appearance and his careful parsing of the South China Sea issue.

Notice he does not
advance the canard that the South China Sea is a vital waterway for Australian
commerce under threat from the PRC.It’s
more about Australia doing its best to act as a willing, nay eager, ally of the
United States in Asia, or as Graham puts it paying “the alliance premium”.And that “international law” thing.And free movement of naval forces.

It should be clear
by now that the South China Sea as a commercial artery matters a heck of a lot
more to…China, unsurprisingly, than it does to Japan, South Korea, Australia,
and the United States.

Here’s the funny
thing.The South China Sea is becoming
less and less important to the PRC as well, as it constructs alternate networks
of ports, pipelines, and energy assets.

The idea that the
PRC will ever wriggle free of the maritime chokehold is anathema to the US Navy,
which has staked its reputation, claims to a central geostrategic role, and
budget demands on the idea that the US Navy’s threat to the PRC’s seaborne
energy imports is the decisive factor that will keep the Commies in their
place.America’s interest in d*cking
with the PRC in the South China Sea predates any Xi Jinping-related arrogance, expansionism,
and island-building and indeed predates the appearance of any PRC Navy worthy
of consideration.It can be traced to
the Office of Net Assessment’s 2004 report prepared via Booz, Hamilton for
Donald Rumsfeld, Energy Futures in Asia.

Indeed, Middle
Eastern oil, oil that at the very least leaves the Middle East by ship, is
probably going to be a big deal in China for decades.But the PRC is trying to do something about
it in reckless disregard of the friendly and disinterested advice of the (Motto: Share and Be Nice!) USNWC.

Again, it helps to
look a map.The Belt and Road initiative
is creating a lot of new channels to move energy and goods in and out of the
PRC that don’t rely on the South China Sea.

While you’re at it,
find the Andaman Sea.It’s between Burma
and India, to the west of the South China Sea and Malacca Strait.The PRC has already built a terminal at Maday in
Burma’s Rakhine State and twinned oil and gas pipelines to Kunming in China to,
as The Hindu put it, “bypass the Malacca trap’.

Those little red
men, by the way?Burma Army
battalions.Security of the pipeline is
a big deal for the PRC, something that it is prepared to ensure even if it
means blackmailing the Burmese government with the threat of unrest in the
border areas, as Aung San Suu Kyi apparently already understands.

And for container
shipment, the PRC apparently plans to jog the highspeed railway it’s building
to Bangkok over to a new deep sea port down the coast from Maday in Burma at
Dawei (instead of pursuing the perennial Thai pipe dream of the Kra Canal
across the isthmus separating the Andaman Sea from the Gulf of Thailand).

Also check out
Gwadar.The PRC has made a commitment to
invest tens of billions in the Pakistani insurrectionary, logistical, and
geopolitical nightmare that is the Boondoggle in Balochistan with the prospect
of sending oil and gas over the Himalayas to give provide another option for avoiding
the South China Sea.

Pipelines are, of
course, more expensive to operate and vulnerable to attack by local insurgents and
more mysterious forces, as US strategists are suspiciously keen to point
out.Ports in third countries are liable
to meddling by pro-US governments, factions, and regional proxies.But the PRC is building ‘em.If the US can spend half a trillion dollars
on our national security, the PRC is also willing to gamble a couple hundred
billion on its energy security in defense and capital budgets (and enrich deserving PRC contractors) and bear the added
operating expense of moving oil & gas from A to B not through the Malacca Strait.

Which means, of
course, it’s time to hype that PRC threat to the Indian Ocean!

As these massive and
risky alternative expenditures by the PRC—and the complete absence of plausible
threats to Japan, South Korea, and Australia interests—indicate, the only
genuine role the South China Sea played as a strategic chokepoint worthy of US
interest is…against the PRC.

Bad news is, with
the PRC putting its energy eggs in a multiplicity of baskets, if it ever comes
to fighting the real war with China—a full-fledged campaign to strangle it by
cutting off its energy imports (like we did with Japan in the 1930s! Hey!
Useful historical analogy)—we’ll have to do it in a lot of places, like Burma,
the Indian Ocean, and Djibouti, as well as the South China Sea.A real world war!

Good news is, as
the PRC’s shipping options increase, the strategic importance of each
individual channel decreases…as does the desire of the PRC, Japan, ROK, or Australia to risk
regional peace for an increasingly irrelevant sideshow—and the local interests
of Vietnam and the Philippines--diminishes.

What I hope is that
the South China Sea, instead of serving as the flashpoint for World War III,
may well end up as a stage for imperial kabuki as the US & PRC bluster and
posture to demonstrate resolve to their neighbors and allies…and an opportunity
for political posturing, amped-up defense spending, and plenty of opportunities
for the hottest of media and think-tank hot takes.

Friday, January 15, 2016

In the case of Martin Luther King, America's deep state intersected with politics and civil rights and Thurgood Marshall's strategy for African American legal equality in some ugly and dangerous ways.

And they intersect at a most unpleasant and unhappy point, one that is largely ignored when putting an optimistic, feel-good gloss over Dr. King's struggle for civil rights: the infamous MLK sex tape gambit cooked up by the FBI.

The most uncomfortable issue raised by the existence of tapes is not the matter of Dr. King's human appetites and deficiencies in the area of marital fidelity. It is the potential for blackmail, the leverage that the FBI and the US government could have brought to bear against Dr. King and his direction of the civil rights movement by exploiting the tapes.

And the case of the tapes also shines an awkward light on the relationship between America's deep state and another African-American civil rights giant: Thurgood Marshall.

For background, I highly recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn
of a New America.Reading it in the
context of Ferguson, Garner, etc. this book really f*cked me up, as they say
nowadays.Based on my experience, I’d
recommend just picking up the book and reading it, without googling “Groveland
Boys” or looking at some reviews of the book.All I can say is that, despite that determinedly sunny subtitle, it will
take you into some very dark places.

Actually, what I will say is that the book also offers some
more fascinating insights into the relationship between J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the political civil rights movement served by Dr. King, and the "lawfare" civil rights legal battle fought with similar dedication and personal courage by Thurgood Marshall.

As I wrote in
a previous post, “Everybody Wants Their Own Stasi,” Hoover disliked and distrusted
Martin Luther King as a troublemaker and, possibly, a communist asset.One of the worst abuses of the FBI was the
campaign of illegal wiretaps and bugging against King and his inner circular
conducted at the behest of the Kennedys.It culminated in the infamous “suicide letter” with an audio tape purporting to represent King's sexual activities,
prepared by the FBI and mailed to King’s
home (not at the behest of the Kennedys, I should point out).

On the other hand, when pressed by LBJ, Hoover devoted massive resources to breaking the
Mississippi Burning case and went on to destroy the Mississippi KKK with considerable efficiency
and apparent enthusiasm.

And then there was the NAACP.

In the
1950s the NAACP’s strategy for attacking Jim Crow in the south was to
federalize the legal issues, using the appeals process to pull the most
egregious cases out of the racist local courts and carry them through the appellate
courts and, if necessary/possible, before the relatively sympathetic Supreme
Court.The Justice Department, including
the FBI, was often a significant adjunct to this process, providing federal
investigators to gather exculpatory evidence in NAACP Legal Defense Fund cases
that local law enforcement, usually riddled with KKK members and sometimes too
cowed and incompetent to do their jobs, had ignored or suppressed or worse.

The NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall in particular, were
sedulous in courting the FBI and endorsing, encouraging, and actively
supporting J. Edgar Hoover’s highest priority/obsession: his jihad against
communist subversion.

And J. Edgar Hoover, as long as he was confident that
inserting the FBI into southern civil rights cases would not “embarrass the
Bureau”, particularly by involving the FBI in cases which threatened to terminate
with humiliating defeats in local courts, was willing to oblige the NAACP.

I haven’t read up on the full history of the NAACP or
Marshall, so I’m not in a position to tease out how much of their
anti-communism was strategic (reflecting the need for rock-solid federal
backing), political (the NAACP competed with a communist-penetrated
organization, the Civil Rights Congress, for leadership in the black civil
rights struggle), or deeply-held ideology.

All I can say is, after a bumpy start, in the late 1940s and
1950s the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall assiduously stroked J. Edgar Hoover on
the anti-communism issue, and J. Edgar Hoover was generally sympathetic to the
NAACP and its need for federal agents to assist in the investigation of crimes
in the Jim Crow South.

Devil in the Grove
provides some examples:

In April 1947, putting
together an NAACP anticommunism position pamphlet, [NAACP president Walter]
White requested a patriotic encomium from J. Edgar Hoover, who replied that it
would be his “pleasure”. [pp. 111-112]

…

Early in the summer of
1950 [with nationwide desegregation of public education now seen as an
achievable goal—ed]…Marshall and the board of the NAACP found it necessary to
pass and adopt an anticommunist resolution, which directed the organization’s
leaders to “eradicate Communists from its branch units.”…Marshall took special
delight in trumping the political maneuvers of the NAACP’s communist
wing…Marshall could…boast, “we socked them good”…The executive staff and
majority delegates of the NAACP had in fact socked the communists good on
virtually every resolution they’d brought to the convention floor in 1950.They walked out in frustration “and never
came back,” said Marshall, whose management of the communist issue…earned him
an oral commendation from J. Edgar Hoover.[pp. 205-207]

…

[On one occasion,
Marshall was embarrassed that an informant with communist ties whom he had
introduced to the FBI had found disfavor with the Bureau...]While Kennedy’s communist affiliations hardly
bore upon the case, they provided Marshall, in his dismissal of the writer’s presumed
scoops, with the opportunity to affect solidarity with the FBI.As always, Marshall expressed his
appreciation for the bureau’s efforts…In return, he was thanked “for his
appreciation of confidence in the work of this Bureau…”Once again, Hoover and Marshall performed
their private rites of cooperation. [261]

Remarkably, the relationship between Thurgood Marshall and
Martin Luther King, two civil rights icons, does not seem to have been
any closer or sympathetic than the ties between Marshall and J. Edgar
Hoover.

King, the
evangelical populist was not on the same page with Marshall, and Marshall, whom
I would characterize as the black cardinal in the high church of America’s deep
state, perhaps found himself somewhat more at home in the company of its Grand
Inquisitor, J. Edgar Hoover.

Readers can judge for themselves, with this excerpt from
interviews recorded by Marshall’s biographer, Juan Williams:

Q: Did
(Hoover) fear that King was a communist?A:
He just had an absolute blur on communism. It's unbelievable. I don't know what
happened to him, I don't know what happened but something happened. No, it was
personal. He bugged everything King had. Everything. And the guy that did it
was a friend of a private detective in New York who's a good friend of mine,
Buck Owens. He called up and said, Buck, do you know Martin Luther King?
And he said, no. He said do you know anybody that goes? He said yes. He said
well you please tell him, don't use my name but I'm in the group that's bugging
everything he's got. Even when he goes to the toilet. I mean we've bugged
everything and I think it's a dirty damn trick and he ought to know about it. So Buck called
me and I called Brother King. He was in Atlanta then. And I told him about it
and he said, oh forget it, nothing to it. Just didn't interest him. That's what
he said. He didn't care, no. Q: How
do you interpret that? A:
I don't and I've never been able to. That he wasn't doing anything wrong. Well
they ain't nobody who can say that. Right. Right. And
when I called him up and told him that his house was bugged and all, he said so
what? Doesn't bother me. That's what he said.Q: Did
you guys know about all this sex stuff that they talk about these days?A:
I knew that the stories were out. And I knew who was putting them out.Q: Mr.
Hoover?A:
No, it was a private police business. They used to settle strikes and
everything. [Pinkertons] I'm not saying whether, I don't know, I don't know
whether he was right or Hoover was right. I don't know which one was right.Q: What
did you think about the fact that he didn't care about being bugged?A:
Well, the answer was simple. I don't know if a man can humanly do all the
things. Five and six times a night with five and six different women. We add it
all up, I mean he just couldn't be all them places at the same time. I don't
believe in it personally. But I don't know, when I was solicitor general, a lot
of things came by, arguments between the attorney general and the director of
the FBI and I, by internal rules, had to get copies of all of it. And we had to
have a special safe and I know that of all the things that I listened to and
read, I never found Mr. Hoover to have lied once. Not once. I don't know, I'm
not saying he always told the truth - Q: You
never found him to have lied?A:
That's right. I mean he was never proved to be a liar. He always came up with
the right stuff, usually it would be a taped thing. You can tell by the tape. I
don't know. But that's between him and, I think the only way to do it would be
him and King and put 'em in the same room. And it's too late to do that.

Marshall’s remarks support Tim Weiner’s portrait of Hoover
in Enemies as an unnervingly astute
and capable bureaucrat who effectively performed his impossible
mission—navigating between the conflicting demands of the Constitution for
civil liberties and the Executive Branch for universal intelligence—with marked
success for five decades…

…perhaps as astutely and capably as Marshall shrank the grey
areas between the Constitution, state law, and justice in his epic struggle for
civil rights.

Contrast with Marshall’s dismissive attitude toward King and
Jesse Jackson:

Who made Jesse Jackson? The press.
Who made Martin Luther King? The press, they do it. Because it writes good, it
writes well. And you know Martin Luther King didn't have a publicity person. No
sir. The press did it all. The press did it all.

Reading Marshall’s account of his
awkward exchange with King over the surveillance issue, I find it hard to
believe that King’s reaction to the intense surveillance was really “oh forget it,
nothing to it. Just didn't interest him...He didn't care, no.”

I have a feeling King didn’t really
feel that way.Maybe what he was
thinking, “Marshall, he’s close to Hoover.I’m not going to let it get back to Hoover that I’m upset or afraid.That’s what he wants.”

David Garrow’s biography of King, Bearing the Cross, tells us of the actual
aftermath of the letter:

The FBI’s frightening
threat sent King into an even worse state of mind.He became so nervous and upset he could not
sleep…”They are out to break me,” he told one close friend over a wiretapped
phone line.“They are out to get me,
harass me, break my spirit.”…King…had decided that something must be done about
the FBI’s threat.He had tried resting
at a private hideaway known to just two other people, only to have Atlanta fire
trucks turn up at the door in response to a false alarm that King correctly
surmised had been turned in by the FBI so as to upset him further…As a deeply
depressed King...discussed the FBI situation [the Bureau had bugged King’s
hotel room in New York]…The conversation revealed how greatly disturbed King
was…King [characterized] the mailing of the tape as, “God’s out to get you,”
and as a warning from God that King had not been living up to his
responsibilities…When King was in Baltimore, [Andrew] Young and [Ralph] Abernathy met
in Washington with [the FBI’s Deke] DeLoach [who denied] that the FBI had any
interest in…King’s private life.Young
and Abernathy knew that DeLoach’s assertions were false…Its one value, Young
explained later, was to show him how FBI executives like DeLoach had “almost a kind
of fascist mentality.It really kind of
scared me”…DeLoach gloated to his superiors that he had tried to make the talk
as unpleasant and embarrassing as possible…Meanwhile the Bureau kept its
campaign on full throttle.Assistant
Director Sullivan tried to derail a dinner honoring King…and two prominent
Georgia newsmen…were contacted to offer them tidbits on King’s personal life…”
[pp. 373-77]

A complicating element of the situation that King had been
previously aware of Hoover’s hostility, and that the FBI was building a file on
his sexual activities.At first, in
November 1964, King tried to go on the offensive against Hoover.King critiqued Hoover’s alleged shortcomings
in investigating civil rights cases and went the extra mile in denouncing
Hoover (in calls wiretapped by the FBI) as “too old and broken down” and “getting
senile.”Then King proposed, in Garrow’s
words, that Hoover “should be ‘hit from all sides’ with criticism in a
concerted effort to get President Johnson to censure him.” [p. 361].As one might expect, this gambit failed to
sway Johnson.

Instead, King was in the unhappy situation of realizing he
had mortally offended a supremely ruthless, capable, and vindictive national
security bureaucrat, one who also had documented evidence of details of King’s
personal life that could destroy him.

King’s efforts to backtrack and reconcile with Hoover in a
meeting arranged by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach were, if not doomed
from the start, too little too late, and King spent the next weeks under a pall
of anxiety that even overshadowed his triumphal appearance to receive his Nobel
Peace Prize at Stockholm.

Then the FBI dropped the hammer in January 1965, sending the
tape and suicide letter.His wife, Coretta, heard the tape; King
gathered his advisers to deal with the imminent threat of humiliation,
disgrace, and failure.

King, bearing this unimaginable mental and emotional burden,
descended into the vortex of Selma…

…and that is, apparently, where the saga of the King sex
tape ends.

The next reference to Hoover in Garrow’s biography occurs in
May of 1965, after King’s triumph at Selma and Montgomery, Alabama and LBJ’s
endorsement of federal voting rights protections for African-Americans:

King knew the FBI
still had an active interest in his personal life, and he worried greatly about
a public revelation of the Bureau’s embarrassing tapes.He asked a longtime family friend, Chicago’s
Rev. Archibald J. Carey, Jr., to speak with his friends in the FBI hierarchy.Cassey did so, reporting back to King that it
would be wise to keep up his public commendations of FBI accomplishments.
[425]

Hmmm.That’s
all?Recall that Hoover bore an intense
personal dislike for King, had information that could destroy King’s reputation
and public standing and, indeed, had already played the sex tapes for much of
official and unofficial Washington.Judging
by the FBI’s machinations, Hoover would have been glad to see King commit
suicide.For King, suppressing the tapes
had been a matter of desperate, existential importance and endless worry.

After all this, all the lethal J. Edgar Hoover wanted was just
a few generous public attaboys from Martin Luther King?

Don’t think so.

I can only draw the inference that LBJ, the only individual
with the necessary stroke and personal relationship with Hoover to channel and
modify the Director’s actions, convinced Hoover that the tapes should stay in
the safe.

And Hoover, perhaps, stayed his hand because LBJ convinced
him that there were plenty more radical and scary African-American leaders out
there to destroy and King, in contrast, was actually a manageable, moderating
force.

And perhaps, with the sex tapes in his safe--and serving as a sword of Damocles over King's head--Hoover believed he could regard King as something of a beholden asset that could be accessed, guided, cajoled, bullied, and if need be publicly discredited in the course of the Bureau's operations involving the African American civil rights movement.

King was the idealist who advocated for America "as it could be".

Hoover and Marshall were two insiders “present at the
creation”, their exalted status and power the result of a hard-won, superior
understanding of the contradictions and potentialities of American government
"as it is".

Their lives--and services to the state--followed different paths.

At the time of the King surveillance, Marshall was serving
as an appellate court judge; the next year LBJ appointed him Solicitor General
and, in 1967 nominated Marshall for a seat on the Supreme Court. Hoover served as director of the FBI until his death in 1972. Martin Luther King, of course, was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Maybe declaring April 4 as "Martin Luther King Day" would be a more meaningful recognition of Dr. King's suffering, struggle, and sacrifice.